After reading the TODO.TXT delivered with beta 8, it appears that CDATA & Text will evolve. This is a good thing, as
long as these classes appear in the same hierarchy and are not merged in one class. There are currently to much
applications using JDOM and doing such a change breaks them! For example, both the introduction of Text and the
exception thrown from Document.getRootElement() really cost us a lot. And we are'nt yet synchronized with our partners,
who did'nt yet update their code and then are incompatible!
Please, ensure that now the API won't change, just evolve by adding capabilties and enhance the overall performance. We
really need to have a stable and released API. I'm really afraid when reading artticle like the one written by Denis
Snososki:
>>>...It also suffers from an API that's still changing every few months with a new beta release (the next version, beta
8, is in preparation as I write this). JDOM does offer a convenient way of building and accessing simple XML documents,
but the lack of stability makes it difficult to justify for use in production projects....<<<
By the way, it is always the same debate: building a true class hierarchy. Currently, the source code with lots of
instanceof is really awful, while a base Node class with make it more ellegant with any penality. Moreover, checking a
node type will be faster when using a getNodeType() like method, instead of using instanceof operator. With the
introduction of Text class, it is very easy and we should leverage it.
Thanks,
Phil.